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Fly-by-Wireless Plane Takes to the Sky
galactic_grub writes to tell us that engineers in Portugal have built and flown a plane with no wires or mechanical connections between the major systems, only a wireless network. From the article: "Tests flights carried out in Portugal have shown that the system works well. Cristina Santos, at Minho University in Portugal, who developed the plane, says the aim is primarily to reduce weight and power requirements. 'Also, if you do not have the cables then the system is much more flexible to changes,' she says."
PS - I note the next story on the front page is "IT: Wireless Security Attacks and Defenses." Coincidence? I think not
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Does an optical cable REALLY weigh that much that someone would want to replace it with wireless? This goes for any situation where functionality is considered to be important. I have a wireless network at home, but I've also run gigabit ethernet through the entire house. The wireless goes down from time to time, but the hard cable does not. The article talks about two benefits, weight reduction and power reduction. In both situations, I would expect that a single lightweight fiber connection and some LED lasers would not be significantly heaver, and would likely use a good deal less power... It just seems to me that the whole idea is little more than academic. I can't think of a single situation where it would be more desirable for a device like an automobile or an airplane to use a wireless system for communicating control information. Someone's got way too much free time on his hands...
Slashdot, where you get modded down as redundant for stating an opposing viewpoint... Independent thought anyone?
Such wireless links could be susceptible to electromagnetic interference or even jamming, Mellor suggests. And it could be more difficult to build in back-up wireless connections, he says. "If you jam one link you would jam both," he warns.
That's also my concern. A high powered transmitter is a lot easier to attack a plane with than a shoulder mounted rocket. (Which simply doesn't have the same range as a high powered transmitter.) A truck with a few generators in series would make for an excellent jamming platform.
There's also the concern of an onboard terrorist using implementation flaws to hack the airplane. The crew would have a deuce of a time trying to understand why they're locked out of their controls.
Some planes, such as the Boeing 777 even use optical fibres, which can carry multiple signals through a single cable.
IMNO, this makes a lot more sense. Optical busses between the necessary components are fast, lightweight, and easy to install. I can't see wireless saving more than a few kilograms over fibre connections.
That being said, in-flight entertainment systems might save weight if they weren't wired up. Running fibre for such systems results in a lot of unnecessary wiring and weight. Since the entertainment system is effectively a low-security system, airplane makers can feel free to use these linkages as long as the control systems remain wired.
She also admits that stringent aviation regulations may mean the technology first appears in cars rather than planes.
That makes even less sense. AFAIK, the horrid nests of wires that previously ran all of a car's electronics have been replaced by more standardized busses. The remaining wiring merely hooks a cars features into the power system. Unless I missed something, Bluetooth can not wirelessly provide power to accessories. Which means that they can't replace the wiring in cars anyway.
Hopefully we'll see this technology help with UAVs and other super-light aircraft. But I have no desire to fly on a plane that has its key systems hooked up through a technology that can be potentially interfered with by the cellphones the passengers are carrying.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The developer says:
I think that qualifies for understatement of the year.
Indiscriminate jamming isn't difficult. I used to hang out with a ham operator so old he had a 4-digit license. The guy had leydon jars made from all manner of old glass containers. He used to cackle with glee after applying the juice for a half-minute or so, then brag about how he had knocked out every TV and radio within a mile. I don't know about the range, but he sure managed to kill the TV and radio in his house by doing that. The point is that relying on wireless anything to stand between me and a flying machine suddenly dropping out of the sky strikes me (bad pun, I know) as a tad foolish.
Now, for deployment of cheaper, small drones in war zones against unsophisticated opponents, this might be a good strategy for making things more affordable. But for anything we might conceive of, today, as an "airplane," I just don't see it. I hope they get the problems worked out. That's what research is for and some really neat things might result. But my first reaction is pretty negative; it's just a weird idea. And it's posted right above a story on "Wireless Security Attacks and Defenses," fer Chrissakes!
Am I being too shortsighted, here?
Considering that every RF technology I've ever worked with has been imperfect, I'd hesitate to ride (or even fly) a wireless network controlled plane.
Here are some of the wireless technologies I know:
She states she is working on the reliability problem. I wonder if it's possible to solve (any EEs out there to chime in?). I used to work for a telcom, and they always had an interesting poster up describing what 99.99% accuracy meant. The most interesting representation: if commercial jets took off and landed at that rate of effieciency, there would be a failure every 10,000 landings/takeoffs. For the sake of simplifying, if there were 5,000 flights a day, that would be 10,000 landings plus takeoffs implying a statistical expectation of failure each day.
I don't know to what level RF can be perfected without some backup system (also RF) that would guarantee perfection but if they ever start flying those suckers, I'm going to wait a while before I board one.
A WiFi card and a copy of MS Flight Simulator and YOU, yes YOU are in charge.
BWAHAHAHAHA.
but this is just plane silly!
Because you can - or because you should?
I really don't think that this is much of anything new. There's no reason why this couldn't have been done 20 years ago, or probably 50 years ago, had someone been sufficently motivated. You could do it with the same sort of PCM systems that are used in radio-controlled models, if all you wanted was controls.
But there's a reason why nobody has done this, and I think that's because it just seems like a really bad idea. There's no safe failure mode for a system like this. If the controls stop working, bad things happen. The only safe way to work around the interference issues would be to have wired backup controls, and at that point you've made the wireless system redundant anyway, because it's only advantageous if you can eliminate the wires.
A plane is always going to have some sort of mechanical connection between all of its parts (otherwise it wouldn't be a "plane," it would just be a collection of stuff moving in the same direction through the air), so I can't imagine that routing wires is really that difficult a proposition.
The only interesting application that I can think of this is perhaps a "semi-wireless" system. If your plane has a lot of metallic parts, maybe you could use the body as a single control wire to tie everything together. You use RF modulators, but rather than transmitting through the air, you just couple the transmitting and receiving antennas directly to contiguous metallic parts on the plane. I think that most of the metal parts on planes are bonded together anyway, to prevent static buildup, to this might be practical. In this case, the signal from the transmitter also attached to the same piece of metal elsewhere in the plane would be so much stronger than the signal from an external transmitter, interference might not be quite so much of a problem.
Still, I'm not sure I'd want to trust my life to it. I guess people probably said that about fly-by-wire originally, or by fly-by-hydraulic when it replaced steel cables, but there are generally good reasons why those transitions are made. I don't see a compelling reason for this.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Most of the early comments seem to be in the vein of "OMG wireless hax!", but consider a real worst-case scenario, like the one that brought down ValuJet 592. It was caused by a fire in the cargo hold that cut critical links between the cockpit controls and the hydraulic systems needed to keep the plane running.
As long as you have a physical connection from point A to point B, it is vulnerable to the most brute-force of DOS attacks: cut the connection and it's lost. A wireless link between the pilot and the control surfaces, on the other hand, can't be cut by a fire in the cargo hold, or even by a shoulder-fired missle (as long as it missed the kablooie stuff).
In a real-world application, I'd expect both wired/optical links *and* wireless backup links. Such a fully redundant system would work both as a sanity check (both systems should be reporting the same results) and as a backup (wired works when wireless is jammed, wireless works when wire is cut).
Plus, I can hardly wait for the netstumbler/kismet folks to write a monitor program to let me monitor things from the comfort of my tray table (on the emergency exit row, of course).
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.